I feel like I need to ask your forgiveness for making this as personal as it's going to be… I grew up — to the extent that I grew up at all — wanting to be a professional writer. From about age seven and beyond, that was my only answer to the question you get […]
I wouldn't go out on a limb and try to claim that any one piece of music was the most beautiful piece in history — but this one's a contender… […]
J.V. — that's how he or she asked me to identify him or her because you could get in a lot of trouble asking a question like this — asked me this question… You occasionally make mention of people including yourself making corrections on comic book art before it's printed. How does this work? Who […]
Some might call it a Guilty Pleasure but I was a fan of The Red Skelton Show — which was sometimes called The Red Skelton Hour during the seasons it was an hour. The series aired from 1951 to 1971, bouncing back and forth between NBC and CBS and between running a half-hour and an […]
An awful lot of controversies are raging in this country at the moment, all of them more important than the Cracker Barrel restaurants changing their logo. No one is being imprisoned or deported because of the new Cracker Barrel logo. No one is dying or losing their access to medical care because of the new […]
It's that Rainbow guy again, doing that voodoo that he do so well… […]
John Oliver's off for a few weeks but he left us this twelve-minute masterpiece… […]
A lot of websites and videos are talking about a scorching debate on CNN in which Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett ripped former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee a new orifice, pointing out his unceasing hypocrisy. It's a great story but as the folks at Lead Stories point out, it didn't happen. A New York Appeals Court threw […]
Just heard of the passing of Guy Lillian last night at the age of 76. No cause has been mentioned but he'd been dealing with severe gastric problems and Parkinson's Disease for some time. Lemme tell you a little about Guy… Guy was a retired lawyer (mostly a public defender) and a prominent figure in […]
The Pacific Pioneer Broadcasters group was a neat little club founded in 1966 with, as I understand it, two goals. One was to preserve the history of West Coast broadcasting — radio and television — and it was pretty successful at that. Materials it accumulated are now housed at the University of California, Santa Barbara […]
From the 1986 Tony Awards telecast, here's a nice little medley of Broadway tunes performed by Ann Reinking, Juliet Prowse, Sandy Duncan, Bea Arthur, Nell Carter, Karen Morrow, Bernadette Peters, Rex Smith, Dorothy Loudon, Cleo Laine, Stephanie Powers, Hal Linden, Leslie Uggams and Helen Hayes… […]
Fred Kaplan explains what's going on with the Russia/Ukraine War. You remember that one…the war Trump was going to settle in 24 hours? […]
I seem to have accumulated some dangerous Internet Algorithms. Any time I'm browsing a site like Facebook or YouTube — any site which shows me short videos by random contributors — I'm deluged with "medical advice," mostly what to eat and what not eat. Once in a while, the advisors might (might!) be doctors of […]
I've always loved a certain kind of actor — the kind who turned up at one time or another in almost every show I was watching when I was kid. Guys like Peter Leeds, Tom Pedi, Ed Peck, Dabbs Greer, Lou Krugman, the pre-M*A*S*H Jamie Farr, Herb Vigran, Herbie Faye — there's a long, long […]
Here's film of Los Angeles and Hollywood in the thirties. The audio and the colorization are fake but the memories are real… […]